“so much for ‘a kinder, gentler politics’” (notes on radical kindness)

A problem: how to negotiate a belief in love, in kindness, in unmaking this violent world so that gentleness can bloom, when injustice continues to be done? Or, more precisely: what happens when the practice of transformative justice fails? What happens when somebody’s behaviour is genuinely harmful, when they’re unwilling to acknowledge the harms they’ve done, and when neither they nor their friends are willing to engage in any sort of transformative justice process?

It’s a puzzle that keeps me awake at night, & one to which I can’t offer any kind of solution. In my experience, there are many people in our movements who, while they might share certain political positions or commitments, are uninterested in or opposed to the sort of radical un- and re-making that my truest comrades & I want to see. This isn’t necessarily a question of individual blame per se; as Marx said, in the Critique of the Gotha Programme (my translation):

What we are dealing with is a [hypothetical] communist society which has not developed on its own terms, but which, rather, emerges from capitalist society, and thus bears in every respect—economic, ethical, intellectual—the birthmarks of the old society…

Given this, it’s unsurprising that some fairly established figures on the left—particularly those who are more interested in things such as policy, strategy, state theory economics etc.—might not have really considered the ways in which politics is relational. Some draw a firm line between their personal relationships and their politics: that’s their choice, but I worry that, without care-full attention, it might lead to the replication of the harms of the capitalist social order—harms that are intensified in the very context of their replication. It’s much harder to deal with a hurt that comes from a comrade than it is to deal with a random insult from, say, a Tory who thinks that Labour lost Blyth Valley because of 20th century French philosophy (a genuine comment that was once made to me). And if the person who has committed the harm is unwilling to acknowledge this; if their friends are unwilling to call them in & work with them to repair what can be repaired, adopting instead a defensive (or even aggressive!) strategy, what can be done?

At that point, it seems to me, it’s almost less about the originary harm than it is about the fact that the harm-doer, in their refusal to engage, is quite likely to do something similar again. There’s no just resolution or mediation that’s possible; the contradiction has become antagonistic.

And so we draw lines.

Often, these lines need only be drawn on a small scale, between friends, between comrades. But what happens when the person who has done harm is powerful? When, in fact, they are likely to leverage that power in order to cause harm, or seek revenge? This calls for a different approach.

Here is where strategies such as no-platforming and public warnings originate, and where they are still most useful. The problem is that, in a context still mostly governed by the carceral mindset of the capitalist social order, these strategies of withdrawal can be experienced as punishment rather than as a necessary act of protection. In other words, they can be experienced as unkind.

I think, talk, and practice a lot about the notion of militant or radical kindness. Having lived through all kinds of abuse—having been harmed irreparably by the exercise of power—the deep, resolute focus of my life is to break those cycles, to ensure that this transmitted pain stops here. Like everything, this is a process: often I fail, often I fall, often I have to pick myself up, ashamed and frustrated, and set about the twin tasks of repair and recalibration. Which is to say that, yes, sometimes I am unkind. But sometimes I am called unkind because, in the process of being kind to somebody else, I have made someone feel uncomfortable with the harms that they have done.

Things I have been called unkind for on social media: asking a left-wing institution not to use ableist language. Defending my spouse, and myself, against some pretty vicious insults. Drawing attention to the repeated poor behaviour of a powerful man. Blocking a person on Twitter for repeatedly picking fights with me. And so on, endlessly, tediously. “You talk a lot about kindness,” they say, “but you’re not being very Kind right now, are you?” Perhaps it is unnecessary to point out that the people who say this are, without exception, attempting to behave in ways that themselves are deeply unkind.

A complicating factor here is in the misuse of public warnings and call-outs to mobilise against somebody with little-to-no power. Putting a 200-follower Twitter account on blast from a position of relative authority is one (though by no means the only) example of this sort of misuse—it’s a carceral, punitive logic that begins from a place of wanting to keep one’s community safe, but fails to take account of power relations and so ends up in a position of injustice. (There are, of course, potential exceptions to this—nothing is a hard-and-fast rule!)

So often harm, or the threat of harm, is used as a disciplinary force, a means of policing the borders of what’s acceptable. Sometimes this is necessary for survival; sometimes, it’s an impulse that does nothing other than hold us all in place. On the left, in particular, it can lead to sort of grim conformity: only the most resilient or the most obedient can endure; and that’s no good when we’re trying to co-create a future that’s gentle and open and nurturing for all of us, unconditionally.

The thing is that kindness, as a concept, is meaningless without context, useless and defanging without an analysis of power. Militant kindness, for me is sometimes about standing between somebody who is suffering and the person who is causing that suffering. It is about saying to that person, No. I will NOT let you do this, and about following that statement through in my actions. It is about disrupting the operations of power, the operations of the police; about intervening in in the visible, the sayable, and making visible and vocal my non-consent to all forms of abuse, all forms of harm. Because of this, it can sometimes look like anger. Because, and here’s the thing, if one wants gentleness and tenderness and what Emma Goldman called “everyone’s right to beautiful radiant things”, how could one not be angry at this world?

(This post draws on an essay from July 2020, Difficult Abolition. This essay deals in more depth with the concept of the police & the carceral mindset, and is available on my Patreon.)

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