reflection on the no kings protest, interpassivity

I was introduced to critical theory, and am where I am today, because of Mark Fisher’s “Capitalist Realism.” I remember reading it for the first time and being so confused by this new language, but I was so intrigued that I read it multiple times just to get an idea of what he was talking about.

The idea that, in my context in the US, that the system operated under the logic(s) of neoliberal capitalism, which hid itself as a neutral/natural form of ideology, seems so obvious in retrospect.

But no one had ever explained it to me that way before. I guess I simply did not have the conceptual language, Fisher provided it for me, and the rest was history. The same thing happened with gender, where I met someone who was non-binary, a category I was unfamiliar with, I ended up taking a gender studies class as a result, read Judith Butler on performativity, and things clicked in a way they never had before.

This does show the liberatory power of language; how naming and learning about new concepts can really change your life, not just in thinking patterns, but even in the body itself, and how that body relates to the world.

As I have been thinking about the no kings protests, Fisher has remained on my mind. He was writing in 2009 about a protest that happened in 2005 (live 8).

And yet it’s like the same protest happened 20 years later, and it makes me ask myself whether we have learned anything since Fisher published “Capitalist Realism.” Or whether we are simply doomed to repeat ourselves in the more openly bold forms of fascism bolstered by decades of neoliberalism in the U.S.

Corporate sponsors? Check.

Vague goals? Check.

Directed at the wrong people? Check.

I think the concept of interpassivity is still useful here.

What does this protest do ideologically? Does it actually spur people to action, like some of the commentary online seems to suggest? Is it a “good first step” in “mobilizing people for revolution” as many leftists optimistically hope? (LARPing as a revolutionary serves its own ideological purpose).

Or is it the same tired protest that leads to more passivity (not that passivity is always negative and action is always positive), more conforming to the status quo, more accepting of the fascist state we live in?

In other words, does the protest do the protesting for us, allowing us to go home feeling satisfied with ourselves without changing anything about our lives?

Because the problem never was simply Trump, it was the decades of neoliberalism–the funding of ICE by both parties that allows them to surveil communities of color, the destruction of the few social programs we have, especially under Clinton under the guise of responsibilization, and the continued militarization of the police and funding of empire through military.

So when organizers of the 50501 event talk about flying the American flag, of reclaiming nationalism, that’s the rhetoric of empire and of the status quo and normalization thereof.

And this brings up the question for me of: how to fight empire from within empire?

I certainly don’t have all the answers, but I know for sure that it’s not repeating the mistakes of the past, by seeing mobilization against Trump as sort of a revolutionary moment (the amount of people citing the 3.5% number as if that referred to anything happening here is laughable), by being lulled into thinking that an event like this can have any positive effect whatsoever.

Because how can an event that is pushing a narrative that “America was never like this in the past” (spoiler alert: it was and always has been), have any net positive outcome on the attendees?

We should look elsewhere–I do believe in community, in mutual aid, of helping our unhoused neighbors against evictions and surveillance, precisely because it is not electoral; it is relational, it is sustained work over time, it connects us together as a community against a system that views certain people as less than human.

This is just one part of the path(s) forward toward abolition, “not so much the abolition of prisons but the abolition of a society that could have prisons, that could have slavery, that could have the wage, and therefore not abolition as the elimination of anything but abolition as the founding of a new society” (Harney & Moten, Undercommons, 42).