“Radical,” according to the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, is an adjective that refers to extremism, or revolution, or something “arising from or going to a root or source.”
Radical is a term that evokes discomfort. “Revolution” conjures up images of domestic wars, fiery streets with limited access to the means to live for non-combatants. Taking elements of our society to the extreme is a form of violence; white supremacists arise from the source of the problems in most countries–colonialism and the processes of genocide, Othering, and once again, waging war.
Anti-oppression radicals seem an oxymoron in this understanding of radicalism. Oppressive radicalism is supported by state violence and the continued state of things. How then can an anti-oppression (anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-ableism, etc.) activist even work towards//against society without…society, and all the privileges and ills it carries?
Matt Bors’ “Mister Gotcha” encapsulates this seeming contradiction, albeit in a bit of a reductive way.
We are rooted in this society, but we are imagining what we could be beyond this breaking point.
The radical imagination I am discussing here, the one I share, is one that conceptualizes an end to oppression in all forms. The radical imagination isn’t utopian, that’s for sure. Power exists. The processes of nature–seasons, weather, life and death–are power. We exist in that power but also use what we can control of it to fuel politics, the process of human society. Trying to remove power from humanity (the goal of utopianism) is likely to be work towards burying the locations of power further into the system and exacerbate the effect of power in current politics–oppression.
Existing in an oppressive society, where power is wielded over others, hierarchical, is not the only option we have; the alternative is power-with, cooperation. At the rate we’re going, our attempts to practice power more efficiently than the other (or Other) and cause further forms of oppression will do us in.
Politics is the system, power is the fuel, and domination and oppression are the effects. The radical imagination, in looking for an end to oppression, means getting to the root of the political system, whether that means disrupting the politics that currently exist or uprooting the system totally. Now, this is where democratic-socialists, Marxists, anarcho-communists, anti-civilizationists, and all other so-called Leftist radical groups diverge in their stated processes of reaching these goals.
I have always had an anti-authoritarian streak and align my radical imagination more with my experiences than with an ideological tag.
In elementary and middle school, I was at the crossroads of white, poor, skirting the edge of “feminine boy” and “masculine girl,” openly attracted to people of the same gender, and overweight–I had to speak the language of boundaries. I learned to despise the ways my success was not what the school was built around, from assigning projects I couldn’t accomplish because I had no reliable transportation until 8 at night to parents discouraging my classmates from interacting with me (because of my queerness as well as my father’s choice to recede from the community after the divorce and my mother going to prison for, effectively, being disabled). By high school and the first semester of my undergrad, it meant I was constantly challenging the necessity of institutions in my essays for college credit, journalistic pieces, creative writings, and victim advocacy training sessions. At the heart of it, I was angry at how I was belittled for my difference and sad that I couldn’t bridge the gap between me and my peers, in school and in the liberal political organizations volunteered for. I felt frustrated and isolated by those I had come to know K-12 as well as abandoned and annoyed by those in the groups I was joining. I was so, so lonely.
Perhaps once I was seeking justice, but justice is shallow. If you flick the surface of a river, you will get a response, but the flow does not stop. Your change is swallowed up by its course.
My infuriated state became a site for growth for a critical consciousness and radical self-reflection. In college, I began to read the works of Audre Lorde (the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house), Patricia Collins (the matrix of domination makes oppressors and oppressed of us all), bell hooks (feminism is for every one), Jasbir Puar (heteropatriarchy, homonationalism, and the queercoding of anti-US State violence), and more. On my own time, I began taking in what I could from groups like Against Equality (making marriage and other institutions more inclusive does not disrupt them), Leslie Feinberg (trans liberation is rooted in a trans history of resistance), Michel Foucault (history and counterhistory), Tomasz Sikora (articulation beyond representation), Jonathan Katz (a gay and lesbian documentary of the US, including sources from Europeans about Indigenous gender), and yes, Karl Marx (to be radical is to grasp things by the root), but mostly to have a better context for Frances Beal (racism is capitalism and a movement to end either must include everyone). Phrases and paraphrases from everything I read began to meld together to situate me not only as a white gay non-cis man but as a beneficiary of a country that prioritizes whiteness materially (capital, citizenship) and meaningfully (historically, culturally) and co-opts the agency of the well-behaved and that in order to invest myself in movements of gender, race, class that did not describe me or no longer described me, I would have to not only act unruly but imagine alternatives for the unruly. I would also have to trust the unruly imagined alternatives of others.
Some movements play too much by the rules, and my annoyance reappears. Take LGBTQ discrimination law efforts. What does one change to a law about discrimination in the workplace mean for all the non-adapted laws and their protocols? A queer person kicked out of their housing but with a job still is unhoused. Is taking the time to change these laws, which will be reviewed over and over again past this point, be as or more worth it as investing in community rebellion (new politics) or a flat-out rejection of law and thus of legally protecting discrimination (new system)? As YouTube anarcho-communist essayist ThoughtSlime spoke recently, in a more liberal or even progressive imagination, the belief is in “the process,” believing that “we [liberals] are the inheritors of a self-correcting, perfect structure, and it is our duty to champion its use until it has had time to create a more perfect world.” I will expand on a radical process for change in my next post, but for now, I restate the failure of utopianism in protecting from oppression but instead inculcating complicity in structures that have proven, at a minimum, to be unjust.
Radicalism does not have space for complicity, in believing the “job” is done; challenge and alternative, a fluid and adapting reflection of what does and doesn’t work for others, is always part of the radical imagination. In regards to the two topics I am considering for my social justice media project, the “job” isn’t done when the land is given back to Indigenous people or the matrices of domination facing trans people are visible–from these turning points, we can look back and reflect in order to look forward and plan. The land and its culture are not healed just by one act; trans wellbeing is not solved just by identifying one problem. The radical imagination observes power critically; even when a radical seed is sown, its roots are still interrogated, to throw in another nature metaphor.
My imagination, like my anti-authoritarianism, begins from my experiences in my body. I am brought to a different space when I think of a radical future–the wooded walks and hikes I did alone at the end of the day in middle and high school. Alone did not mean lonely, because I was fulfilled in the paths I was taking and the sites I was seeing. I followed the creek until the sky was the dull orange of dusk. I watched the seeds the DNR planted after the storm of 2005 start to become trees. I did not wallow in my being during this times, like when I’d come home from school and drink a gallon of milk while crying, but imagine a stronger self, one who was told that it was okay to be frustrated and angry but that these emotions would not be the work that got me back to a home that I could look at in a different light.
The radical imagination looks not only at the source of social strife but how the radical social agent can be a source of change. That means looking at yourself and your culture as well as the greater for the change that needs to happen.
I look at the change that needs to happen in the US’s approach to detrimental changes in climate through cultural narratives that punish households for pollution over businesses and push for devastation of Indigenous land and stewardship as well as my complicated desire to share a solar-powered cottage with close friends in rural Minnesota some day. I will not be “saving the earth” by continuing to displace those who know and want to protect it. I look at the change that needs to happen in ensuring trans people’s wellbeing by reflecting on not only trans death but trans life, how resources for trans people are complicated to navigate, how my own transphobia interrupts my commitment to trans celebration.
The flowing river may actually be the side effect of a dam, and changing its flow doesn’t mean taking it into your own hands, especially if you don’t know how to stop it except through altering the dam controls or graffiti-ing the dam. Oppressive radicalism aims to make the dam a threat, that the idea of destroying the dam will flood and kill everyone. And they are right. But the dam is not a complete picture of the system at hand; who benefits–who is at the root–of its existence? How are we alike? And how do we get them to see themselves in something greater than they are? Therein lies radical change, a holistic transformation of acts and thoughts that incentivize new ways of doing culture and society.