addendum on naïveté

I should also say that I think the fake letter is important as a political strategy. It means that the mayor’s office is put in a position where it is forced both to acknowledge the difference between the mayor that people are imagining and the mayor that exists in reality. The truth is, if Jean Quan had really, verifiably, sent a letter like the fake one, many would call it an act of political suicide. Fox News would have a red-baiting field day, sure, and it would almost immediately trigger a counter-mobilization among the Oakland right and centrists to call for her recall or resignation.

At the same time, thinking about this “fake” statement of solidarity should raise the question, on the left, of what it means to be an elected official. Quan’s real statement to Occupy Oakland is anemic and patronizing. It confirms the extent to which Quan understands her role as a mayor is to regulate dissent through the meting out, and legitimation of police violence—violence that, in contexts when there is not mass mobilization downtown, is usually restricted to Oakland’s black and brown youth. The “real” statement also confirms the extent to which Quan understands her role as securing the protection of private property, which always gets expressed as an overture toward ”small businesses.” Of course. When mayors fetishize small businesses, they fetishize an ideal that is almost entirely unobtainable for the great majority of Oakland’s population. ”Small businesses” exist only in our imagination, particularly in fantasies that include images of quaint downtown districts organized neatly with mom and pop shops that are at the center, and the heart, of the community. In this fantasy, it is the community’s heart—the small business—that needs to be protected, on one hand, from being swallowed up by the corporatization of everything, and, on the other, from rowdy protesters who show no respect for private property, from forms of commerce that are standard feature of our urban landscapes (the drug trade, sex work, etc), and from the symptoms of the poverty and homelessness that are the logical outcomes of a capitalist economy. The dominant tendency in the U.S. is to fetishize small business owners like we fetishize the middle class—it is a group that everyone is supposed to imagine themselves as either currently or eventually belonging to, and therefore preserving the small business owner is ultimately key to preserving our way of life. No one ever criticizes the small business owners as a class, even when they treat their employees like shit, fail to pay them living wages, fail to provide any considerable benefits, etc. Which most of them, of course, do.

Quan’s commitment to protecting small businesses is indistinguishable from the commitment to protect big businesses—that is, corporations. The same policies that protect the one protect the other by proxy; it is, after all, through loans from the banks that keep the small businesses afloat. The small businesses have absolutely no autonomy from the big businesses and exist, therefore, not as the expression of some integrated community, but rather as the expression of corporate capital’s attempt to represent itself as quaint and homey. In Oakland, the small business owner exists not as a person but rather as an alibi. An alibi for the militarization of the police, an alibi for gang injunctions that essentially legalize racial profiling in black and brown neighborhoods, and an alibi for the squelching of dissent.

If you’ve attended any of the Oakland City Council’s deliberations on the gang injunctions—which, in spite of the passing of injunctions in North Oakland and Fruitvale, have been rather tremendous organizing efforts by the Stop the Injunctions Coalition—you’ve likely noticed that it is the small business owners who have been among the strongest and most decisive voices in favor of the injunctions. They have formed coalitions with property owners and various tenants organizations and have represented themselves—some of the most prosperous members of their various communities—as the victims of gang violence. These are black and brown folks, men and women, who actively participate in the militarization of the police and the rationalization of racial profiling, not because they are not sufficiently racially conscious, not because they are bad blacks or Latinos, but because it is in their economic interests to do so. And it is these interests that Quan’s “small business” line positions her as the protectorate of.

The contemporary U.S. left, in all of its complexity, is often wary, if not hostile, toward electoral politics, which, given much of what I’ve outlined above, is in many ways understandable. What excited me about the fake statement was what it allowed me to imagine about the possibility of electoral politics. I imagined that the tremendous pressure placed upon Jean Quan in the past week might have actually pushed her to recognize the legitimacy of a segment of the population—the radical left—to which she rarely considers herself directly accountable. Naïve, perhaps, but if you asked me a month and a half back if I thought that anything substantial was going to happen with the Occupy Wall Street, I would have done the scoff-and-roll-my-eyes thing that I’m so good at doing. The point is that when people begin to organize themselves, what you imagine as possible can and probably should also change with it. At the same time it is in fact wildly naïve to imagine that Quan would sorta just magically move towards support of the general strike and a critique of capital. It is a naïveté that genuinely surprises me, one for which I don’t think a return to the safe, comfy, home of political pessimism is the remedy.

Pessimism, of course, always protects you against the risk of naïveté, from the risk being cruelly and embarrassingly dragged back to the hard harshness of the realities that exist on the ground. Pessimism is also a form of disciplining your own political imagination—for the pessimist, reality simply confirms what you already know. It is a style of imagining politics that is biased toward I-told-you-so and you-should-know-better statements. Pessimism is the way in which the much of the U.S. left directs its is own political imagination away from electoral politics and toward images of insurgency and popular uprising in the streets; images that fetishistically figure the revolution in its most picturesque moments but not the society, or the everyday life, that exists in its wake. But there is something naïve to the pessimism that the use of the mechanisms that exist through electoral politics can’t be part of a revolutionary project. The fake letter from Jean Quan is, in a way, a critique of that naïveté. It conjures up a Jean Quan who occupies the seat of elected authority differently, and in a manner that cuts against the pessimism of those on the left who prefer to imagine their role as only ever opposing power and never actually taking it, much less being accountable to its use. It asks us to imagine—naïvely—something that is hard to believe as possible.

But perhaps there is something here that we need—a promiscuous relationship to political possibility that risks naïvete. We need this because pessimism crowds out by definition routes of political change that we can use, and use in order to begin training ourselves in being accountable to each other in new and unprecedented ways. To me, this means materializing the momentum the movement has gained by risking complicity with the system we have found comfort and solidarity in defining ourselves in opposition to. Obviously, this is a big thing to raise, and it may sound bizarre in relation to electoral politics, so I’ll try and tackle some of it in the near future.