Reject the rejectors! Exclude the exclusive!
I am the only good person alive!
It’s a sad practice of activists to spend their days working to punish and banish people who agree with them almost completely - one form of this phenomenon that I want to take a look at here is the genre of attack that goes something like “if your feminism isn’t XYZ then it isn’t feminism!!” Take a look below for some examples:
It isn’t just feminism that gets this treatment - what you see is an attack on a particular political commitment, claiming that it is invalid unless it is extended to include other particular political commitments too. What starts as a concern about women’s oppression in particular must be extended to include a concern about racial oppression, trans oppression, etc, in order to count as a valid way to be concerned about women’s oppression in the first place. And then the same treatment gets applied to these new particulars that get brought in. If your antiracism doesn’t include abolishing capitalism then it isn’t antiracism, and if your trans activism isn’t anti-ableist then it isn’t trans activism, and so on and so on forever.
What it points to is a sort of vision where there are no particular political commitments at all - the only valid way to exist is in total, all-consuming opposition to oppression in the biggest and deepest and most general way possible. It is a vision of political commitment that is so inclusive of all forms of oppression that none of them become possible to focus on, since to focus on one form of oppression is to somehow deny the validity of the others and risk rejection by fellow activists, whose approval is precious to you.
These sorts of attacks are really only going to work on people who care what the attacker thinks of them - the attacker’s enemies are going to laugh and maybe enjoy the agitation, and unpolitical-but-maybe-convincible people are going to shrug their shoulders and maybe shudder at the thought of their own children growing up to be so angry. The only people an activist can denounce successfully are other activists. And so a maximally-inclusive vision of political commitment generates a maximally-exclusive vision of who gets to count as valid, as “one of us” who are changing the world in the only proper way.
What I see as driving this is a certain search for autonomy. Perhaps you experience overwhelming anxiety and agitation and believe that your only relief is in somehow becoming free of the bullshit of society, and so of course you want to think new thoughts and use new words and create your life in such a way that you completely resist the bullshit of society without compromise. And so, of course, every crack in this armor, any evidence that you might be partaking in oppression in any way, must be dealt with immediately and with passionate vigor - the only valid way to exist is as a completely different kind of person than the worthless people who thoughtlessly obey the oppressors.
And so you have people who are so relentlessly focused on achieving their own thought-liberation that they alienate themselves from ordinary people, deliberately so. Autonomy is superiority, liberation is denunciation. The most worthy thoughts are those which expose the unworthiness of those who do not think them - the most worthy words are those which are incomprehensible to anyone else but you, which as such can never be used to hurt you.
I think this way of being is both doomed and self-perpetuation - doomed in that it will never succeed on its own terms, and self-perpetuating because that failure to succeed will always be able to be explained by the bullshit of society. It’s a trap that people can fall in.
I’m writing all of this because I see myself as having fallen into it without noticing it and having had to work to crawl out of it. I really can’t say anything else about activism in general, beyond accounting for what I see as my own drives and my own pain and my own struggle to achieve autonomy from that particular drive for autonomy.
It’s important to say that reforming society is always important and good and that some sort of critical consciousness is always worth cultivating, and also that it contains the strong potential to become all-consuming when it gets hooked into us in a particular way. Who is “us”? I guess you, if this writing resonates with you. If it doesn’t resonate with you then there’s likely nothing either of us can do to change each other, and we still have to figure out some way to live together.