Left Of Lenin

Yes, yes it has. I’m now, like, 1.5 months into law school. I’ve lost none of the all-consuming fire that drove me forward and convinced me to return to this career path, but I’m starting to see the fissures and immovable objects that I’ll have to contend with if I want to use this degree for the things I thought I did. It’s a super-enervating experience, slowly realizing that at least two of the avenues you wanted to pursue for the just end are being rapidly closed–that by the time you graduate, the space that you’ll have to fit your lawsuits-as-sticks-of-dynamite are no longer the size of dynamite, but pinholes. No matter, though. This was the path I chose and, like every other dumb decision and mistake, I won’t cut my losses and acknowledge defeat. I’ll double down.

Anyway, I’m gonna be publishing all the college work that I’ve had saved in drafts–and I’ll be doing it today (at least, mostly). Maybe peeking at some old shit will remind me of why I’m here at all.

I am in Law School now, sitting in a writing class. It’s just now occurring to me that I’m about to get a lot worse at the kind of writing that I actually like to do. C’est la vie, whatever, eh?

Probably gonna post my old work in a separate subpage as soon as I can figure out how to do so. I’d say “watch this space” but, honestly, don’t.

I really did mean to write in here more, really did intend on throwing all’a them thoughts in here. But, unfortunately, I spent the better part of April and May laying around hoping my neck and back pain would just, like, go away. Tried all that stretching nonsense, tried pillows and sleeping positions, and nothing was working. I disdain (and don’t even really enjoy) opiates, but I suddenly understood the chronic pain sufferer who becomes a heroin addict. Not, uh, not a great place to be in.

Aaaanyway, all 0 of my average daily readers, that’s why I didn’t type in here for a while. I just, like, wanted to die. And, at times, perhaps thought I was.

Now it’s back to not really wanting to die but typing it a lot. That seems to be the difference; the people who actually want to die don’t spend a lot of time typing about it. They just die.

Looks like I’m headed to Law School, folks. I’d say, “this might cut down on posts” but I honestly don’t know how you could cut further.

An exhortation to the 0 people who will see this: keep your calendar clear on the 1st of May. I have a feeling that this year will be slightly more intense than past years.

A reclamation of the holiday, perhaps. Perhaps not.

Lately I’ve been in a position where I can’t necessarily decide whether or not Twitter is good or bad for the Left. After roughly a year and a half of being fully ensconced in that area in the tripartite Venn diagram where Left, Weird, and Hockey Twitter meet (there’s like a dozen of us) I’ve noticed a violently shitty tendency in the discussions on the Left. There was a brilliant piece that I often see referenced in these parts (“Exiting The Vampire Castle”), so I needn’t do a pale imitation of that.

But in the last three weeks I’ve bore witness to a series of idiotic and banal arguments that were so strategically-placed at certain lynchpins of the On-line Left that if I were 4% more paranoid I’d be certain were done by COINTELPRO. Some were idiotic and absurd and ended in threads of people posting their own boobs, others disconcerting and intractable in their divides (looking at you, dumb Liz Bruenig mini-controversy). But all shared two important similarities: they were dumb and distracting from the most important goal and they were ON-FUCKING-LINE.

I’m forced, therefore, toward a conclusion that I had settled on three years ago and then tossed out midway through 2015: Twitter is actively harmful to social movements and mass politics.

By May 2014 I had the basic thesis that social media was a wholly ineffective metaphorical release valve, giving people validation without necessarily giving them a material outcome to justify that pleasure. The events thereafter, however provided compelling counterarguments. I notived Fight for 15 and #BLM getting the word out and gathering large crowds in a largely-ad hoc fashion. I saw miniature wildcat strikes and freeway shutdowns. There was an undeniable power to these new tools.

Further thought, however, has forced a distinction upon me. Fight for 15 and BLM are examples of movements or organizations that merely demonstrated the power that immediate information dissemination has–that power is only useful, sadly, insofar as there’s a material, political ask with that power backing it up.

So now we come to yesterday, March 20th. There was a talk from their ABCs of Socialism series, one that I knew would get the hackles of the “JACOBIN SMACKS OF CLASS REDUCTIONIST DUDEBRO” up as soon as I saw the topic. The official Jacobin twitter account tweeted some innocuous excerpt from the talk, and while I saw some protestations to the wording (that I agreed with, for the most part), it looked like another mini-controversy that would blow over by the time I woke up on the 21st.

That, uh, that didn’t happen. Instead, today was another fucking trench war, Leftists fighting Leftists for either being insufficiently woke or a counterrevolutionary liberal. Granted, these are the schismatic tendencies of the far radical groups of the fringe, but it seems as though Twitter is making these inevitable flare-ups easier, faster, and more completely universal–especially when the work of protest and the networks formed are digital and “blocking” someone is equivalent to them ceasing to exist.

While it is clear that my sympathies lie with the people who (perhaps overzealously) push class first–if only due to the unique backwardness of the USA in class politics–the people who make these callouts are rarely doing so in purely bad faith. They genuinely feel like the issue, person, wording, or idea at question is making the hard work of solidarity harder, and we should take concerns and critiques of this nature seriously. But Twitter isn’t real life.

The callout is undoubtedly a good tool, one that I have used and has been used on me to great effect, but each time that I can say that actual growth or understanding was achieved, I was looking another person in the eyes IRL. The callout only works because you can see the sincerity in someone’s face, either their anger, disappointment, or sadness. This may sound facile or self-evident, but think on this for a moment: has it ever worked on you, when someone on twitter is trying to call you out? No, we tend to retrench.

And so it is in these two ways–the demobilization of the electorate with the release valve of good twetes and the streamlining of calling out without the face-to-face component that makes calling out useful in the first place–that I fear that Twitter is officially tipping toward “net negative.”

This isn’t really the point of the blog, I know. I mean, it’s my fuckin’ blog, so I can do with it what I will, but this isn’t politics.

But Chuck Berry did die last night.

Now, an incredibly important aspect of the person I am boils down to music and my ability to soundtrack the goings-on around me. This has always been a truism for me, going all the way back to swim practices in 5th grade that I mentally grafted to “Nevermind the Bollocks” in all of my remaining memories.

Without Chuck Berry, this is impossible. Without Chuck Berry, it’s beyond impossible–it’s unintelligible.

While I rarely sought out Chuck qua Chuck, it is literally impossible to not get Chuck qua Jimi, or Chuck qua Johnny and Joey, or Chuck qua Iggy. Chuck was the mold from which Rock and Roll was cast. Everything I love in guitar-based rock, from the insouciant smirking as the solo starts to the physical flourishes–jutting the neck up and down as though being electrocuted–to the pure buzzsaw energy, I have Chuck to thank for.

So pour some out for the Inventor of Rock and Roll today. I will.

My main pursuit–intellectual or otherwise–from May 2014 to (almost exactly) November 8th, 2017 was to find a way to shoehorn Socialism into the fabric of the America that I grew up in.

After those 3 years, I’ve come to the conclusion that that pursuit and the questions that inspired it may have been 100% folly. That the pursuit was folly, however, may end up providing answers to many of the questions that I encountered in the pursuit of answers leading toward the ontologically-supreme goal: advancing Socialism in the USA.

The America I grew up in is a dusty, snowy, windy high mountain desert, nestled between the ski areas and Denver–suburban sprawl punctuated by mesas, hogbacks, and foothills. You’d think the suburbs endless, were it not for the interventions of geology. It was, until I returned from college, a largely foreign land that I felt I didn’t need to make any effort to understand; after all, I grew up there.

Thusly, if the overriding goal was/is instantiating Socialism, I was already putting myself behind the 8-ball–perhaps even further away, behind the 8-ball, two tables over. While it was almost certainly due to the arrogant overconfidence of the 18 year old in part, it is understandable that I wouldn’t see the things about Colorado that I’d need to until I removed myself from the situation, hovered above and one abstraction away like an objective scientist.

After four godforsaken years in the literal swamp of Washington D.C., I returned to the place where I grew up, ready for the rest of my life. Instead, I found out just how hard it is for a Philosophy major to get a decent job in a city that was pivoting–and fast–to high tech pursuits. Consequently, I ended up in my parent’s place, hating life and wasting time.

This period lasted almost 6 months before I found employment with a healthcare nonprofit. That said, I still couldn’t make enough to move out, so I had the unique position where I was making what one could theoretically deem as an “adult income” while still living at home and not paying rent.

So I bought books. I bought a lot of fuckin’ books. Books about Marx, about the history of America, about geography and the environment and psychology–I consumed nearly everything I could in order to better understand the world around me. In that pursuit, I began to notice a pattern, a pattern which could help to bridge the divide between the Socialist Colorado in my head and the Hickenlooper/Hancock Colorado of bitter, grey reality.

I had never given much credence to the idea that different peoples had distinct political cultures. It seemed to stray too far from the “material base defines superstructure” orthodox understanding of Marx that I agreed with. That said, a very small portion of Colin Woodard’s American Nations and a couple of odds and ends that led to further specialization and further narrowing has given me my new synthesis (if you’ll allow such insanely lofty language).

According to Woodard’s conception, the “unique national culture” of the Interior West is that of a resource colony. And this makes sense. In the early 1900’s when monopoly capital ran rampant, the political reaction was one of SPUSA and IWW; as the Bundy ranch debacle demonstrated, in modern times the railing is against faraway government bureaucrats. In both cases, however, there is a similarity: a concentration of power (or capital), thousands of miles abstracted from the facts on the ground, exerting control over OUR lands and resources.

There IS a unique political culture in the Rocky Mountain West. We are a reaction against the perceived locus of power on the coasts. And, again, in that purely materialist conception, the Interior West is still a resource colony. Have been, hopefully won’t always be. At least, that’s what the actually-existing-socialists who kept getting elected in Montana, Nevada, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico hoped around the turn of the 19th to the 20th century. Many of the names that got involved in this period in time are famous to only a very specialized group of people–names like Mary Harris Jones, Bill Haywood, Davis Waite–and many of the conflicts sound like made up Civil Wars from Newt Gingrich’s alternative history novels. The Victory Mine Massacre, the Colorado Mining Wars, the Bombing of the Vindicator–if these names make it sound like a legitimate war was going on, that’s with good reason: there was.

For your right to the 8 hour work day, many miners died. Many of their family members were massacred. Many of their leaders were assassinated. But they didn’t give up. Even when they were atomized immigrants of several different european countries brought in to break strikes, unable to communicate (and thus, organize) with the east of the English speakers, they managed to coalesce and find solidarity in one another. Even when the armed forces were called in on you, you never considered surrendering and instead began military training. Labor has never been more radical and vital than in the mining industries around the turn of the century, and it’s time to remind folks.

The reading, researching, traveling, and thinking led to one conclusion. The Rocky Mountain West is ready for Socialism, ready for a return to a time when Red State meant RED and the GOP felt it necessary to literally hire private armies to hold us back. I went to D.C. looking for some rational, liberal nonsense that would provide a silver bullet in “solving” Colorado’s politics. I stand here, 8ish years later, knowing that there’s no silver bullet, none save organizing. 8ish years ago, I left Colorado thinking something pathological about the character of the state and I know now that there’s no pathology here save what the coasts gave us. We always had it right, and goddammit we just need to remember why and how we got it right.

Bury me at the rodeo.