Smarmy Social Democrats on the Anniversary of the Long March

Yesterday, during the initiation of #occupytoronto, the group with which I was involved brought a banner of Mao's face to our anti-imperialist march and into the occupy site.  This was appropriate because, as the person who painted the banner reminded me, today is the anniversary of the beginning of the Long March. Although I'm not always into expressing my politics through floating heads (because I think that sometimes this facialization might obscure political content), what made the banner interesting in this specific context was that it encouraged more attention and interaction than the majority of other banners that were mainly acronyms, abstract designs, and not entirely distinguishable from each other.

For most of yesterday the banner was photographed by pretty much everyone with a camera (sometimes these people asked us to pose, or asked to take a picture with Mao's head), but more importantly we were forced to interact with a constant barrage of people who wanted to know why we were standing with a painted effigy of Mao Zedong. [Although one of my friends joked: "why are you marching with an Andy Warhol banner?"]  On multiple occasions this curiousity resulted in fruitful political discussion that ended with an exchange of emails.  Once, because I guess the politics represented by Mao in the common imagination was apparent in our head (these folks are crazily anti-capitalist!), we were actually asked by someone else to intervene in a confrontation with the libertarian Ron Paulbots who are using these #occupy demos to push an abhorrent anti-people politics.

Right when we were about to pack up the banner and go to the general assembly, however, we were finally met with hostility.  A group of self-satisfied, smarmy protestors, one who was a self-proclaimed and proud "social democrat" banded together to inform us that Mao was a "mass murderer" and that our banner was akin to "hate speech."  The social democrat felt he had the right to inform us that we had no right to be at "his" protest.  Here was where the facialization predominated and the talk became abstracted from the political content represented by the head; we ended up getting sucked into an argument about the historical facts of the Chinese Revolution, particularly the Cultural Revolution.  And though a number of us (including a friend who wasn't a Maoist but who was genuinely surprised by the earlier positive reaction we were getting and found this round of critiques idiotic) demanded sources for these typical counter-revolutionary claims, going so far as to demonstrate that we were largely aware of the sources they were using––but sources they themselves could not cite––these social democrat morons were unable to offer any convincing counter-argument.

So what should this tell us about the use of a stylized face as a political banner?  We know that there are some cultish groups (such as the RCP-USA) that use the faces of pseudo-revolutionaries to push a cult of personality that lacks any depth.  We know the ultimate silliness that results in this method of political practice: posting stenciled photos of Bob Avakian's head around Burning Man.  Since Mao Zedong was the foremost revolutionary leader and theorist following Lenin, there should be a clear distinction between the use of his image and that of Bob Avakian's but, still, there is always the possibility that the use of a revolutionary face could conjure the spectre of a cult of personality that ends up replacing revolutionary political content.  After all, Mao's image was used even by the enemies of Mao's political line during the Cultural Revolution.

In the context of the #occupy movement, however, I think the use of Mao's image resulted in a very fruitful social investigation.  If we are in a moment of accumulating revolutionary forces, then those the most curious about, but not necessarily hostile to, Mao, and who wanted to talk to us about politics, emerge as a population of possible allies or future comrades.  The fact that many of the people who spoke with us wanted to exchange contact information was perhaps even more important than ideological exchange.  And the fact that we pissed of a small group people revealed that population which will refuse to organize around revolutionary ideas: one of them even said that he rejected the violence of every revolution, of every moment where the oppressed were forced to kill their oppressors.  These are people who find the entire notion of revolution abhorrent, a significant sector of the 99% who, as discussed in previous posts, would be quite happy becoming the 1%.

Moreover, it is telling that this counter-revolutionary population claims the #occupy movement as their own.  These proud social democrats are clearly under the impression that this movement is their terrain, that activists who have been organizing (however movementist or sectarian) in Toronto for years are "offensive"––chances are they would never show up at any of the older style demonstrations, probably not even at the G20 or previous anti-globalization demos, and exist in a state of historical absence where nothing has proceeded before "their" movement arrived to represent "their" petty bourgeois ideas.  Again we are forced to recognize the current petty bourgeois boundaries of the #occupy movement; by recognizing this, however, we should be led to push a politics that rejects the limits beloved by these social democrats who are so offended by the entire notion of revolution.

It is both interesting and important that in this activist context the image of a revolutionary leader can be polarizing.  But the point of revolutionary politics is, by these politics' very nature, to be polarizing.  Class struggle is necessarily polarizing in that it divides people into revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries; if we pretend otherwise we are engaged in opportunism.

We on the left have always used divisive and polarizing symbols.  There was a time when Che's image, before it became a pop-cultural icon was extremely divisive (and it still is for some), and I remember a time, not so long ago, where wearing a Palestinian keffiah was considered extremely "divisive" and "alienating" even amongst the mainstream left.  But those of us who were anti-zionists and who, over a decade ago when the Palestinian struggle was not yet a normative feature of mainstream leftwing demos, intentionally wore keffiahs in order to make a polarizing political point.  I remember when the keffiah would cause supposed leftists (some of whom today are now all about boycott-divestment-sanctions) to complain that I was supporting "extremism" and that the keffiah, though not a face, was an instance of "hate speech" because it was "anti-semitic."  But now that the keffiah has become a staple of the activist dress code (and at one point even a staple of the hipster dress code), only raving zionists would argue that it is "offensive."  The reason it was initially worn, however, was to be intentionally political which means intentionally divisive.

Once you take a clear political position you have already articulated who is included and who is not.  Even those liberals who pretend they are apolitical––because liberalism is a default position––have decided who and who is not included in their politics; they might imagine everyone is with them, but the truth is that, like those smarmy social dems at yesterday's #occupy kick-off, have decided who is excluded from their set politics.  All political commitments are defined by, their very goals and ideology, deciding who are political friends and who are political enemies.  Which is why Mao once argued, in his analysis of classes in Chinese society, that we have to begin by answering the question who are our friends and who are our enemies… I suppose that, yesterday, it was appropriate that the image of Mao's face made us think of this question.